They say that in order for you to become a better programmer, engineer, scientist, or any other discipline, you must practice your craft.  Most athletes, doctors, and performers who have found success will tell you that hard work is the only way to accomplish their goals (The 10,000 Hour Rule comes to mind).  A professional baseball player who has been struggling at the plate over the past week will come into batting practice a little earlier, analyse his batting stance, and correct any mechanical flaws in his swing by coordinating with the hitting coach and taking extra batting practice hours before a game.  Musicians will practice playing an instrument over and over again until they feel that they have mastered that guitar solo, perfected their vocal pitch, or synchronized their timing.

In the world of programming (whether it is software, web development, or embedded systems) practice is one of the majors keys to becoming a better programmer.  Like the above-mentioned cases (Looking back at it now, they may be poor examples.  Hey, I’m trying to get better at writing/blogging too!)  I cannot stress it enough.  In my area of expertise, this is often accomplished by solving the same types of problems over and over again.  Over the years, you become a better problem solver.  You learn how to break down a problem into a subset of problems, sort them by importance, come up with a strategy, and start working towards a solution.  Or if you’ve become frustrated, you can look up the solution over at Stack Overflow

For the sake of my own personal goals, I am expanding my programming knowledge by learning various MVC Frameworks.  In my current position, we use different versions of Zend Framework 1.  The thought of porting our existing codebase over to Zend Framework 2 has been brought up from time to time.  However, I personally feel that before any type of porting were to happen, it would probably be best to refactor and optimize our codebase.  Also, the majority of us do not know of the architectural changes made to ZF2 and we would be left scratching our heads trying if we were to attempt to port it. From a personal point of view, I have been reading several of ZF2’s performance issues and I am not completely sold on what it brings to the table.

So for my first challenge, I will code up the small application from the ZF2 tutorial over at the Official Zend Website.  I’ll be posting a review on my initial findings sometime later in the week.

Wish me luck!